Advances In Computer Technology In The Last 20 Years
By Alan Biron
A computer is a machine that manipulates data according to a list of instructions. The first devices that resemble modern computers date to the mid-20th century (around 1940 - 1945), although the computer concept and various machines similar to computers existed earlier.
Early electronic computers were the size of a large room, consuming as much power as several hundred modern personal computers.
Until this time, parallelism was limited to pipelining and vector processing, or at most to a few processors sharing jobs. The fifth generation saw the introduction of machines with hundreds of processors that could all be working on different parts of a single program.
The scale of integration in semiconductors continued at an incredible pace - by 1990 it was possible to build chips with a million components - and semiconductor memories became standard on all computers.
One of the most dramatic changes in 1990s will be the explosive growth of wide area networking. Network bandwidth has expanded tremendously in the last few years and will continue to improve for the next several years.
T1 transmission rates are now standard for regional networks, and the national ``backbone'' that interconnects regional networks uses T3. Networking technology is becoming more widespread than its original strong base in universities and government laboratories as it is rapidly finding application in K-12 education, community networks and private industry.
A little over a decade after the warning voiced in the Lax report, the future of a strong computational science infrastructure is bright. The federal commitment to high performance computing has been further strengthened with the passage of two particularly significant pieces of legislation: the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, which established the High Performance Computing and Communication Program (HPCCP) and Sen.
Gore's Information Infrastructure and Technology Act of 1992, which addresses a broad spectrum of issues ranging from high performance computing to expanded network access and the necessity to make leading edge technologies available to educators from kindergarten through graduate school.
Modern computers are based on tiny integrated circuits and are millions to billions of times more capable while occupying a fraction of the space.
Today, simply computer may be made small enough to fit into a wristwatch and be powered from a watch battery. Personal computers, in various forms, are icons of the Information Age and are what most people think of as "a computer" however, the most common form of computer in use today is the embedded computer.
Embedded computers are small, simple devices that are used to control other devices for example, they may be found in machines ranging from fighter aircraft to industrial robots, digital cameras, and children's toys.
The ability to store and execute lists of instructions called programs makes computers extremely versatile and distinguishes them from calculators. The Church-Turing thesis is a mathematical statement of this versatility: any computer with a certain minimum capability is, in principle, capable of performing the same tasks that any other computer can perform.
Therefore, computers with capability and complexity ranging from that of a personal digital assistant to a supercomputer are all able to perform the same computational tasks given enough time and storage capacity.
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